Hegemony and Exclusion: Observations on Latin American Constitutionalism Reflected in the Chilean Experience

This article tracks the function of Latin American constitutionalism with a particular concentration on the history of Chilean constitutionalism, to determine the general inability to establish a representative constitution. Through an interdisciplinary Gramscian methodology based on cultural and legal studies, we propose that the function of a constitution is to institutionalize the perspective of the dominant class and thus establish its hegemony. Therefore, it is argued that the existence of representativity in a constitution, one that symbolizes the different social groups in it, is a fiction when one takes into account the general Latin American experience (as demonstrated in the example of Chile), since the hegemony of a dominant class has simply been perpetuated to the detriment of the subaltern.